Aubin: Demos exercises in futility

Henry Aubin

Dear resolute street demonstrators,

I feel sorry for you (and I’m not being ironic). Police arrested a staggering 453 of you on Wednesday. (That surpasses the 371 rounded up during a protest against police brutality in 2002 and is exceeded only by arrests of 518 anti-tuition demonstrators last May 22.) And police say it brings to about 1,350 the number of arrests in five leftist demonstrations so far this year in Montreal.

At this rate you’ll easily smash the unhappy record for most arrests in one year that you set in 2012 when some 700 tuition-related protests produced 1,868 arrests.

I feel sorry for you because most you will pay a stiff $637 in fines and related fees — that can really hurt a young person’s pocket book.

But mostly I feel sorry because this week’s demonstration, like your earlier ones this year, was an exercise in futility. You’re making sacrifices for nothing.

The aim of the May 1 protest, organized by the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, was to call attention to capitalism’s abuses — including the illegal ties between business and politics that the Charbonneau Commission keeps unearthing and last week’s tragic collapse of the exploitative Bangladeshi factory that made cheap clothes and big profits for the West. Yet that message got scant attention.

Media coverage focused naturally on what was most remarkable and thus most newsworthy: the high number of arrests and the striking reason for those arrests.

That reason is the organizer’s wilful defiance of Montreal’s Bylaw P-6. It accounts for all but a relative handful of this year’s arrests. (A few were made for vandalism and other crimes.)

This mass defiance of P-6 makes no sense, and that’s why I’m writing.

The year-old bylaw requires you to give police the itinerary of your march before you start out. It also bars participants from wearing facial coverings unless they have a “reasonable motive.” (Wearing a mask that lampoons a politician would presumably qualify as “reasonable.”)

The Anti-Capitalist Convergence said in a statement Thursday that the “liberticidal P-6 bylaw is only the latest instance of the repressive tendencies of the elite class.” The year’s other marches protested such other issues as police brutality and tuition but they, too, saw P-6 as violating civil liberties.

Liberticidal? Come on. You can march anywhere you want so long as you give police a few minutes’ notice. (A press report that P-6 requires 24 hours’ notice is incorrect.) Giving cops advance word allows them to block off traffic and guard against vandalism on the route of march. Those are legitimate reasons for demanding notice.

I think, dear demonstrators, that you ought to like, not fight, P-6. You think I’m crazy? Here are my reasons.

Respecting the law would mean arrests would not eclipse your message.

You’d have fewer masked vandals joining in — as they did Wednesday with billiard balls, bottles and other projectiles. They couldn’t bring discredit so easily on what might have been intended as a non-violent event.

You’d reduce any chance that police in civvies and masks might infiltrate your demonstration and commit acts of vandalism to “justify” a police crackdown.

Some anti-tuition protesters told me last spring this could be was happening, and it’s not necessarily a paranoid apprehension. Although Montreal police are not known to have ever used agents provocateurs, the Sûreté du Québec did so at the international summit at Montebello in 2007: Three officers, one of them filmed clutching a rock, posed as Black Bloc types with black bandanas over their faces.

Public opinion — the same public opinion that you’re trying so earnestly to influence — might take you more seriously. Today, many people don’t see why you can’t give police your route and, then, ignore police warnings to disperse. They see you as silly lemmings.

Oh, and here’s a bonus reason for respecting P-6. You don’t like cops? Well, then, stop inviting mass arrests. That would mean the police department would no longer have to deploy such great swarms of officers working overtime.

Don’t hurt cops by tolerating masked rock-throwers in your midst. Hurt them — and help taxpayers — by depriving them of juicy OT.

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